∴ikura

Trust

Although there are countless things to keep in
mind when knee-deep at a start-up, there are
two aspects that always sit front & center at ikura.
For us, nothing is more paramount than user-trust,
and customer retention.

As it turns out, trust & retention are quite
complimentary: one doesn’t want to deal with
a product/company that can’t be trusted. And similarly,
customers don’t tend to stick their neck out for a
product they don’t love.

Matching trust with technology

Erlang/OTP is a fantastic choice for
any software start-up that cares about trust.
Let’s consider Erlang’s strengths for a moment.

Erlang comes with libraries and best practices that
are battle-hardened via demanding industries like
Telecom & big software. OTP dates back to 1996,
and Erlang the language, dates from a decade prior to that.
Simply put, Erlang is a tank of a language and won’t likely
let you down. I think tech founders should seek out tanks,
and not gravitate to the newest vehicle in the cul de sac.

Erlang’s slogan of ‘you can experience nine
nines (%99.9999999) of uptime’ is no joke. Once a
well-constructed OTP system is humming away,
acts of god are usually the types of
things operations have to worry about.

When it comes to trust, I think adopting
unproven technologies is frivolous. Certainly, new toys
can provide for some fun learning, but at the expense
of users? That’s unwise.

In choosing OTP

There are some ‘gotchas’ if Erlang/OTP is to be selected
over other more trendy languages.

First, some Erlangers boast that OTP is an excellent choice
for prototyping. In my experience, it’s not.
Sloppy Erlang code carries an astoundingly high technical debt.
In the long-run, reworking that hairy mess of functional
code will set your start-up back, although you may have beaten
your competition out of the gate. (But why are you going into
an arena where there’s competition in the first place?)

So, writing fast & loose Erlang in order to prototype is
probably a zero-sum game. However, if you prototype
with some care, you certainly can maintain a sustainable
code-base without much pain.

Another glaring issue when choosing Erlang as your start-up’s
language of choice is this: it may be difficult or
expensive to locate developers. There isn’t much to be said
about this as it should be obvious why this could
challenge a start-up. However, the sliver lining here is that
you may attract some interesting talent when touting an Erlang
code-base. Also, the BEAM
ecosystem is growing slightly thanks to new languages like
Elixir & LFE. Soon
enough, there could be no shortage of Erlang-hungry developers.
Who knows?

Trust is king

With the above caveats in mind, any founder or
technical lead who cares about trust should seriously consider Erlang.
For me, Erlang means reliability — and reliability means
trust for all those customers.